Launch to Scale Ep. 02: Setting The Right Goals and KPIs

Mitch Kaster

Setting strong employee advocacy program goals and KPIs can help correlate outcomes to overall business metrics and even answer questions like, which employee has shared the most content? Which article, webinar or eBook is performing best on social media or how much earned media value have you generated?

This is one of the main things that gets me excited when I’m working with our customers because we get the opportunity to dig deeper into KPIs to make sure we’re fully aligned with our customer’s expectations.

In episode two of Launch to Scale, I discuss how to establish the right goals for your employee advocacy program, how to communicate those goals internally and which metrics to measure for success!

Transcript

Many marketers today are increasingly using employee advocacy to help amplify their content through their employee’s social networks but one of the key challenges we hear often from marketers is on understanding what content is performing best, how to increase the number of employees sharing and what’s resonating with our audience on social media.

All of this ties into setting strong program goals and KPIs that allow you to correlate to overall business metrics and even answer questions like, which employee has shared the most content? Which article, webinar or eBook is performing best on social media or how much earned media value have you generated?

Setting goals is one of the main things that gets me excited when I’m working with our customers because we get the opportunity to dig deeper into KPIs to make sure we’re fully aligned with our customer’s expectations.

I’m Mitch, and in episode two of Launch to Scale, I’m going to discuss how to establish the right goals for your employee advocacy program, how to communicate those goals internally and which metrics to measure for success!

Establishing goals and KPIs is a critical first step that should happen before any employee advocacy program is launched. It is important to communicate your established goals across the different regions, offices or business functions within your company so each program admin is aligned fully with the prescribed goals – they also need to be creating content that ladders up to these metrics!

My first recommendation is to always measure how an employee advocacy program will impact your business goals. For example, are you trying to increase time spent on the website by sending higher quality traffic through employee referrals?

From a high level view of goals and metrics, you can segment by use case and business function. As an example:

For Sales: revenue generated, pipeline influenced and opportunities closed.
For Recruitment: number of new hires via employee referrals and cost of hire lead sources
For Marketing: volume of traffic to website, marketing attribution and qualified leads generated

My second recommendation is to ensure the more granular metrics you can use actually reflect back to your current business goals. As an example, some of the metrics you can track with a solution like Postbeyond include: total number of shares, external engagement, monthly active users, monthly active sharers, total reach.

By ensuring you have a strong correlation between employee advocacy goals and KPIs with your overall business objectives, you can hold all business segments accountable to specific goals.

At PostBeyond, one of my responsibilities is to setup a Quarterly Business Review with our customers on a consistent basic where these metrics will be reviewed and benchmarked on an ongoing basis. This allows a customer to see how they’re currently performing, where are the blind spots that they may have missed and what insights can be fed to growth the program.

Here’s a quick snapshot of a Quarterly Business Review. For example, you may have seen a significant spike in your website traffic, you may want to dive deeper into which specific branded content assets drove traffic to your website. Then you may want to leverage a platform like PostBeyond to see which employee shared those posts exactly and how much earned media they generated alone.

On the flip side, you may see that employees aren’t sharing enough content, you may want to look at improving the volume of content you’re approving for employees to share.

In the PostBeyond platform, you can see a snapshot of our dashboard on social media performance, what content is being shared, how many times it’s being shared, on which networks, and how much engagement that piece of content received such as comments, likes and potential reach.

Tying employee advocacy to overall company metrics will show the true impact of your program.

I hope this gave you a good understanding for how you can establish goals for your employee advocacy program and how to measure specific KPIs and identify areas of improvement for your overall employee advocacy program. From content sharing to how you’re doing with employee advocacy, setting the right metrics will ensure you’re on the right path to success.

Once again, my name is Mitch. Thank you for watching this episode of Launch to Scale focused on setting the right metrics and KPIs for employee advocacy.